In a twist to our
story yesterday where AMD
apparently settled questions surrounding its Silicon-On-Insulator process
production timeframe, we were contacted by Nico Ernst who stated his strong
belief that the chipmaker will ship SOI products by early 2002, well ahead of
AMD's production roadmap.

Ernst, of the polished German site tecchannel.de, toured AMD's Fab30 in
Dresden this April and was able to
obtain images from
its Material Analysis Lab. The information he gathered seems to indicate
that AMD started up SOI conversion as early as November.